Memories of the Future (13 page)

Shakespeare of the Apes

L
OWERY WAKES; IT IS SUNDAY MORNING.
Breakfast sounds come from below, but he does not immediately arise. He lies beneath the tousled muslin sheet lackadaisically listening to the faint clatter of cookware, to tap water being drawn, to the muffled sound of Nora’s footsteps on the tiled kitchen floor. The bedroom is awash with bright summer sunshine, redolent with morning’s grass-green breath.

* * *

The walls of my prison cell are the texture of time. The door is a checkerboard of nights and days. Opposite the door, a little window looks out upon Tomorrow, but it is too high for me to see through. The furniture consists of a solitary chair and a small table. Upon the table lies a ream of writing paper; next to it, a quill pen protrudes from an inkwell that has long since gone dry—

* * *

He smells coffee. There will be eggs, Western style, and toast and bacon. He kicks back the sheet, swings his feet to the floor and feels with his toes for the slippers he stepped out of the night before. Felt-shod, he pads into the bathroom where he relieves his distended bladder and washes his face and hands. He combs back into place the straggly wisps of dark-brown hair that crawled down over his domical forehead during his dreams, checks to see whether he needs a shave. He doesn’t quite, but he will very soon; he must trim his minimustache too. It is his only physical affectation and lends him an appropriate academic air.

In fauve dressing gown, he descends the carpeted stairs, walks through the large living-dining room and enters the coffee-scented kitchen. His orange juice glows in a little frosted glass that stands upon the Formica breakfast counter; he dispatches it in three neat swallows. Behind him, Nora says, “Mom and Dad’ll be here right after mass.”

Lowery makes no comment. Nora, who attended five o’clock Saturday mass, drops two slices of bread into the automatic toaster. The counter is set for two; she dishes out bacon and eggs and pours coffee. At thirty-eight, she is not nearly as drab as her disheveled hair and shapeless housecoat proclaim. Her movements reveal a natural litheness, a pleasing fullness of hip and thigh. Her hair, after the dishes are done and put away, will be combed to her shoulders in dark and breathless undulations, the waterfall tresses parting to reveal her narrow bit comely face, her eyes a wild-flower blue beneath plucked black cornices of brows.

* * *

—In choosing her for my mate, I could have done far worse. It is true she is but little less insensitive, but little less materialistic than the other members of her tribe; but she is durable, even more so than her genetic coevals. The females of my native chrono-land are worn out before they are thirty. This is all right—then. But here in the past it is
comme il faut
to live with the vase long after the flowers have withered and died; thus, it is well for the vase to be sturdy.

I must include this profound observation in the text of the novel I shall never write—

* * *

Scene 2. The house faces east. In its shrinking backyard shadow, stillform dew-diamonds glisten on the grass. Standing on the awninged patio, wearing walking shorts and gripping a ten-pound bag of briquettes, Lowery surveys his demesne. Not far from the patio a Schwedler’s maple stands. To Lowery’s right, a rear door provides ancillary access to the adjoining garage that houses his Bonneville. Between the Schwedler and the patio rises the outdoor fireplace he built last summer with his own two hands. It is remarkably like the one in the back yard next door that his neighbor, Hungry Jack (the epithet is Lowery’s own), built with his own two hands.

Lowery cannot start the sacred fire this early in the day, but he can and does pour forth the sacred briquettes. Several years ago on the heels of a sweltering summer, in response to some masochistic quirk, he directed his English class to write a composition entitled “How My Father Spends His Sundays.” His masochism was amply appeased: Ninety percent of the fathers were of the same sacerdotal stamp as he and conducted similar carbonaceous ceremonies.

There is no need for him to mow his lawn—he mowed it yesterday. But the grass girdling the base of the Schwedler and that flanking the footing of the patio escaped the rotary blade and is both straggly and unsightly. Dutifully, he gets his trimming shears from the garage and sets to work.

Next door, his neighbor, Hungry Jack, starts up his red riding mower; the Sunday silence, unnatural to begin with, absconds. Jack handles the mower as though it is a big bulldozer, sitting top-heavily on the little toy seat. One of his seven sons comes of the house, rubbing his eyes. He begins running after the little red bulldozer. “Dad! Can I drive it? Can I?”

“No!” Jack roars above the
ROAR
. “Get back inside and finish your cereal!”

Jack waves to Lowery as he makes the first pass. Lowery waves back, looking up from the base of the Schwedler. Seven sons . . .

* * *

—Unlike the Parnassian Block which the Quadripartite psycho-surgeons interposed between my personal unconscious and my endopsychic sphere, the subsequent electrosurgical excision by the Quadripartite techmeds of my
vas deferens
was a routine rather than a punitive measure. Prochronisms occasioned by cellular retro-dissemination and reassembly create only insignificant disturbances in the time flow and can safely be ignored (consider, for instance, how many CRR’s are involved in installing just one political prisoner in a past cell); however, a single prochronism introduced into the evolutionary pattern of the species is capable of creating a turbulence powerful enough to divert the flow into an alternate channel. Obviously, then, no dictatorship in its right collective mind would, in imprisoning a political enemy in the past, risk his impregnating a female who preceded him on the evolutionary ladder, to say nothing of his accidentally making
enceinte
one of his own genetic ancestors.

I would not in any case have wanted seven sons. I do not even want one—

* * *

“Vic,”—Nora’s voice from the kitchen—“the Sunday paper’s here.”

Lowery finishes trimming ’round the base of
Acer platanoides Schwedleri
, postpones manicuring the patio footing and re-enters the house. After pouring himself a second cup of coffee, he retires with it to the living room where the
Sunday Journal
awaits him on the end table beside his fauteuil. Scene 3. The
Journal
is gaily wrapped in comics; he discards them, sits down and feasts upon the same intellectual viands that by now have been delivered to Jack’s doorstep, and Tom’s and Dick’s and Harry’s farther up the street.

After updating himself on venality, corruption, rape, murder, mayhem, and the weather, he turns to the book reviews. The
Journal
devotes an entire page to them. There is a new novel by Nabokov, another trilogy by Barth. In a little box near the middle of the page is a humorous anecdote about Mark Twain. Since first giving its literary reins a shake, the
Journal
has published at least a thousand boxed anecdotes, half of them about the same literary figure. Lowery, who has read most of them, abandons this one in disgust before he is halfway through the first sentence.

* * *

—“Twainophilia”—I humbly coin the term—is a common ailment among the present-day simians. Ironically, Clemens is most admired by those who have never read him, and to those who have, much of his prestige is owing to a later American literary figure’s having taken time out from the anti-impotence campaign he waged incessantly against himself via his fiction to declare
Huckleberry Finn
America’s best book. It is true that the Sarn Regime will reserve a niche for Twain/Clemens, but it will be a lowly one indeed compared to those reserved for Nabokov and one or two other twentieth-century giants obscured in their time by that troglodytic shadow out of the past, and it will owe its existence more to nostalgia than to any genuine literary prowess.

Living myself in that omnipresent shadow, I sometimes wonder whether the Quadripartite Tribunal in imposing my sentence might not have exacted greater punishment if instead of ordering a Parnassian Block inserted between my personal unconscious and my endopsychic sphere they had instead permitted the creative flame that consumed me in my own time to consume me in this: to have let me write now with the same wild discipline with which I wrote “before”—only to see the gold I minted hopelessly outshone by the nostalgic glow emanating from that overburnished tombstone—

* * *

The roar of Jack’s toy bulldozer has been superseded by the fainter roar of another ’dozer farther up the street. It nicely backgrounds the screams of children celebrating Sunday morn with bicyclic expeditions ’round and ’round the block. Lowery curses softly, casts the
Journal
aside. In the kitchen doorway, Nora peers from between her dark waterfall tresses. “Mom and Dad’ll be here any minute now, Vic. Don’t you think you ought to change?”

Upstairs, Lowery showers, shaves, then trims his academic mustache. He gets out a clean pair of summer slacks and a fresh short-sleeved shirt. Nora’s parents pull into the driveway in their Imperial while he is tying his shoes, and he hears Nora greet them at the front door. However, he does not immediately go downstairs; instead, he steps into his study across the hall and sits at his desk. Scene 4.

The desktop is bare save for an extension phone and an ashtray. Underneath the desk, inches from his feet, is a large cardboard box filmed with dust. In the box are a dozen notebooks filled with neat, backward-slanting script, a pair of legal pads similarly filled, a ten-page typewritten outline bearing the title “3984,” two typewritten drafts, similarly entitled, the one rough, the other heavily corrected and revised to such an extent that the words contained in the additions and the insertions outnumber by far those contained in the original text. There is no fair copy.

Next to the desk, a portable Smith-Corona sits up on a metal typewriter stand. Its transparent cover is cracked in three places. Shrouding it is an aura of desuetude so thick it can be cut with a knife.

Lowery stares at the machine unseeingly. Bookshelves cover one whole wall from floor to ceiling. He lights a cigarette and blows the smoke at Emma, Tom Jones, and Moll Flanders; at Becky Sharpe, Jane Eyre, and Lord Jim—

* * *

—Dear Mom and Dad:

A note to let you know that I am feeling fine way back here in the pages of the past. My in-laws have just arrived for the weekly tribal rite at which a burnt offering of barbecued fryers will be presided over by your son Victor. Living among the Tech Age apes was difficult at first, but I have since learned their ways and have made a place of sorts for myself in their society. I have even, as you know, married one of their number. There is a major drawback, of course, occasioned by the Parnassian Block, about which I have written you many times before. But that was to be expected. As you are aware from my previous epistles, I tried in vain during the early years of my incarceration to circumvent it; since then, however, I have pretty much accepted my role as simple-minded preceptor, instilling errata, misevaluations, and misconceptions in the minds of my pupils and telling outright lies to their faces. Lest I give the impression of a state of utter misery, let me quickly add that

I have learned to brachiate with passable skill and have even come to enjoy to a limited degree the common pastime of collecting baubles on the forest floor. Well, as I have said, it is Ritual Time again; so I must terminate this latest in the long line of letters that I shall never write. Hope you are well—

Your loving son,

Victor—

* * *

“Vic,” Nora calls from the foot of the stairs. “They’re here.”

He can procrastinate no longer. Woodenly, he descends to the living room. Scene 5. Dad’s mesomorphic frame sports a double-breasted gray plaid; rail-thin Mom is clad in a powder-blue suit. Dad’s cologne is a thick miasma in the room, Mom’s perfume a transparent mist. As always, she makes much of Lowery, kissing him on the cheek. She regards herself as his second mother. Dad stands some distance away. At Nora’s suggestion, everyone sits down, Nora between Mom and Dad on the sofa, Lowery in his fauteuil. Dad dwells at considerable length upon his relatively recent prostatectomy, then goes on to lighter topics such as the pain Mom keeps getting in her side and that Dr. Kelp says is nerves. Inevitably, the conversation works its way around to Tom, Nora’s oldest brother, and Dad just happens to have Polaroid snapshots of Tom’s and Barbara’s three adorable children, taken just last week. Dutifully, Nora and Lowery study the polychromatic photos, Nora passing them to Lowery, Lowery letting them accumulate on his lap and then passing them back to Dad.

It is time for Dad to mention how well Tom is doing in Construction. Dad is a bricklayer, retired, and in his own day did very well in Construction himself. Witness his split-level home in the country; witness his ’74 Imperial standing in the driveway. Lowery squirms in his fauteuil. Nervously Nora lights a cigarette. Dad glares at her. Mom says, “If everybody was a bricklayer, we’d all be driving brick automobiles!” It is a favorite joke of hers, reserved for just such occasions as this.

Nora gets up and turns on TV. The twelve o’clock news has just come on. An airliner has crashed in Chile. Thus far, only one hundred and two have been reported dead, but the figure is not final by any means and may momentarily be increased. Lowery excuses himself on the grounds that he must get the charcoal going—glowing?—and gets up and leaves the room. Behind him, he hears Mom remark, “Poor boy. Every time an airliner crashes, it brings it all back.” She is referring to the airline disaster of twenty years ago in which Lowery’s putative parents were numbered among the one hundred fourteen dead.

Scene 6. Lowery’s chef’s apron is hanging in the kitchen closet. It has been laundered since the last Dum Dum he presided at, but although the grease spots and the charcoal smudges came out, the cute clichés did not (
CHIEF COOK AND BOTTLE WASHER, GET IT WHILE IT’S HOT!, HI NEIGHBOR!, THIS SPACE RESERVED
). Masochistically, he puts it on. There is a comical chef’s hat that goes with it. He dons that, too, pulling it down till the band digs painfully into his domical forehead.